Same Old Ways
by ImpalaLove
Summary: Written for Otorisosa-Kan's September prompt challenge. Title was chosen for us, and we got to write the rest. Spoilers for all 10 seasons! "There is a gun lying on the table beside the bed. It blinks at him lazily; regards him from where he sits propped against the headboard..."


**Written for Otorisosa-Kan's September Challenge Exchange.** **For this month's challenge, a title was chosen for us and we had to write a story to go along with it. Title is: Same Old Ways sent in by ThurinRanger.**

 **This story basically has spoilers for all 10 seasons, so please don't read unless you're all caught up. Written from Dean's perspective.**

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Same Old Ways

There is a gun lying on the table beside the bed. It blinks at him lazily; regards him from where he sits propped against the headboard, fingers interlaced behind his head. The gun blinks again and asks him a question.

 _Will you?_ It whispers. _Do you have what it takes?_

It is not the question you think it is.

There is life to be lived here, and he is happy to live it as long as he can do so with the man who is laying in the other bed on the other side of the room, far away from the locked door and from the gun on the nightstand.

Dean looks at the gun on the table and he gives the same answer he gives it every morning before his little brother awakens.

 _No_ , he whispers back. _Never_.

Twenty-eight hours later Sam disappears from that very bed and calls Dean over a week later, panicking. Dean finds his little brother sitting on a different bed in a different motel room with his hands in his lap and a stranger's blood on his shirt.

Dean shoves that same gun from the nightstand into the waistband of his jeans and bends to look his brother in the eye.

They retrace steps and pull the pieces together slowly, and it feels like the way an oven overheats with no one to quell the flames. But Dean has dealt with fire his entire life, and he can put this one out too. He just needs to know what he's dealing with. But before he can figure it out, Sam stands in front of him with that stupid gun, and he asks the same stupid question.

" _Dean, you promised him. You promised me."_

Dean gives the same answer he always does, but he doesn't expect the gun to fight back with the cold sting metal against the side of his face. There is a brief moment, right before unconsciousness, where he thinks he feels relief. Because that can't really be Sammy, can it?

It isn't. He's right, and finally Sam can speak with his own voice and move his own limbs again. Possession is an ugly monster they've never seen up close before. Dean wishes they'd never had to.

That night, he carefully sketches a devil's trap onto motel stationery, and in the morning he takes Sam to a tattoo parlor.

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There is dirt beneath his fingernails and something dead beating inside his chest. Dean digs a hole into what feels like the center of the earth. If he had to, he would dig all the way to the other side, but all he has to do is bury the small box with his picture in it and wait. He waits.

 _Ticktock ticktock ticktock._

He seals his last year of life with an unclean kiss and drives as fast as he can back to his little brother.

Sam is waiting for him and Sam is alive again, and that is all that matters.

 _Ticktock ticktock ticktock._

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There is dirt inside his lungs and he cannot scream loud enough to be heard. And then he crawls out of an unmarked grave and walks as many steps as it takes to get back to Sam.

Dean throws up in the bathroom as the sun streams in through the window and tries not to blink too much. Just a dream, he tells himself. Not Hell.

 _NotHellNotHellNotHell._

A little while later, Sam closes the door of the motel room behind him and sets coffee down on the table, and he knows for sure.

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Dean still has the same gun as before, the one always resting on the nightstand. Sometimes he sits up in the middle of the night and feels the weight of it in his hands. Sometimes Sam isn't lying in the bed across from him. It feels like all of the time.

When Sam _is_ there ( _but still not really there, not really_ ), they talk about the new beasts that roam their world now and Heaven's Seals and Hell's intentions. They talk about an angel named Castiel. They do not talk about Ruby or a siren that poisoned them with hatred, an axe on a downward path.

They don't talk about demon blood until Dean sees it drying around the corners of his little brother's mouth, sees the snarl that doesn't belong to that face. Even then, he doesn't even think to reach for the nightstand-gun. Instead, he locks Sam inside his own head and listens to him scream from inside the walls of Bobby's basement until the blackness dries itself out.

He wonders who he's really saving this time, but still, he has to try.

Dean throws up in the bathroom again and wishes for Hell. At least there, the pain and shattering of bones were his own. Something else has shattered now, a fragile and important piece of who they used to be. Dean tells himself it just needs time to grow back, but he wonders how long that will take, and if it will be the same shape as before. Sometimes even fingernails grow back crooked.

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Sammy ends the world with the flick of his wrist and a trickle of blood from his nose, and as the room fills with brilliant light, Dean reaches for the sleeve of Sam's jacket instead of the gun from the nightstand.

He doesn't forgive easy, but he also doesn't leave. He thinks there's victory in that, maybe, even when moonlight catches metal and the gun shakes its heavy head.

 _Should've done it when you had the chance_ , it says.

Dean thinks about throwing it out the window of the Impala on one of the lonely rides he takes in the middle of the night while the little brother he barely recognizes barely shifts in his sleep. At least one of them can still sleep easy. At least it's Sam.

He keeps the gun because tossing it wouldn't lighten the load. Not even a little bit.

Sometimes Dean feels like he and Sam have left the Earth's atmosphere. He always imagined it would be fun to live in a place with no gravity, to walk on the moon, but he never thought about breathing without air. He never thought about going up and coming down too slow, landing on the opposite side of the world. He never imagined Sam might follow a different orbit, one forged by the Devil.

Lucifer swims in the wide space that grows between them, and no matter how hard Dean tries, he cannot pull Sam back to him; away from this newest, ugliest influence. So instead, he fills his lungs with what he thinks is a lie. He says 'yes' to the angels who have only ever taken everything from him, and he does it for one reason.

" _If I do this, then Sammy doesn't have to?"_

Turns out, Sammy still has to.

Dean watches his little brother topple over the edge of the world he helped destroy ( _I forgive you I forgive you I forgive you_ ), and feels the rest of his oxygen dry up inside his veins.

Lisa and Ben try their best to fill the holes Sam left, but Dean has the half-formed belief that all they're really doing is throwing more dirt over his grave. The thought never fully forms because he doesn't care either way.

At night, he sits alone beneath the glow of a tiny table lamp and searches for a loophole that will get them both out of Hell.

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Sam comes back and Dean is so busy breathing in this newfound air that he almost doesn't realize how different his baby brother is now. Until he does. And then it is the only thing he notices, and he cannot help but think of the gun on the nightstand again, because how many different ways can he fail to save Sam before the second option starts to make more sense?

Damn John Winchester for only giving him a coin with two sides. Somehow it has just kept rolling all this time, never to topple over. Their lives are filled with impossibilities, so Dean supposes he can't be too surprised, or even upset. After all, one of those impossibilities, a deal with Death himself, is the reason he can finally get his brother back. All of him. Sam walks and talks like himself again, and Dean can almost convince himself that things are back to their kind of normal.

Until the wall inside Sammy's head breaks open and Lucifer spills out.

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Dean stands in a whitewashed hallway and watches Sam through a tiny window. He sees the droop of his little brother's lips; a smile that has been absent for a long time. He watches the way Sam's eyes flicker blearily around the empty room, reacting to someone who isn't there. The gun from the nightstand is loaded with two bullets, and Dean holds it in trembling hands. He stares down at it for a while, testing the familiar feel of the weapon he has discharged too many times to remember, always to destroy the evil that has plagued them since Sam was six months old. He wonders if this would count as destroying evil, or if he's finally just done fighting.

And then he shoves the gun back into his jeans, pushes the door open, and meets his little brother's foggy eyes.

" _Sam, I'm gonna find you help."_

" _I don't think it's out there,"_ Sam replies. Dean tries his best not to agree, but by the time he leaves the room with his dying brother in it, he's seriously considering pulling that trigger. Instead, he finds a faith healer named Emmanuel with a face like Castiel's, and somehow he does it again. Dean gets his brother back.

He reloads the nightstand gun with as many bullets as it will hold, because if there's anything he knows, it's that more evil will come. This time he will be ready for it.

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He isn't ready for this.

Dean spent three hundred and sixty seven days in a place that reeked of death and monsters. He tore his way through the underbelly of a beast few could imagine, and somehow made it out the other side. And he found Sam again. This time is different though, because Dean can't help thinking that maybe Sam doesn't want him anymore. Things have shifted now, tectonic plates re-aligning to create an earthquake. Dean thinks maybe it's more of a volcano though. He's just waiting for the eruption.

When it comes, he isn't ready.

When it comes, it means Dean has to watch his brother die again, and this time is different too. Different, but the same. The three trials that will board up Hell's gates are an agony all their own, a slow corrosion of the tall man with the wide eyes and the too-long hair that Dean doesn't even pretend to joke about chopping off anymore. Sam is already withering away; he doesn't need to lose anymore of himself than he already has.

This time, the nightstand gun doesn't speak to him, and if it tries, Dean ignores it. He has to win. He _has_ to win. _Right?_

Sam spits blood that begins to smell more and more like Purgatory. Everything begins to smell like that place, and Dean wonders if he ever should've left. Maybe if he didn't, Sam would have a dog and a girl named Amelia somewhere out in Texas.

Instead, Sam stands in a church with the King of Hell and gives away the blood that hasn't yet made its way into the sink or been half-hidden in the tissues thrown hastily into the trashcan. Dean is halfway past terrified by the time he stumbles back into that church, and he is almost too late to talk his little brother down from the ledge. Finishing the trials means Sammy dies and Sammy dying means that nightstand gun will become relevant again, and Dean's been ignoring it too long to give up now.

Later, when Sam collapses against the black paint of the Impala and can't seem to find his lungs, Dean realizes he was too late anyway.

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Dean prays. Not for a miracle, because he doubts those exist anymore. This prayer is a logical one, and it gets an answer in the form of an angel named Ezekiel. Dean doesn't hesitate for as long as he should because the choice he faces now is the same one his father gave to him all those years ago. The same two-sided coin that sits on its edge and never falls over.

This time, Dean doesn't leave it to chance, and he doesn't flip the coin. He just slams it on the table: tails down, heads up. And so an angel walks inside his brother's body and Dean does not tell him. Because Dean needs his brother back.

Later, when the secret is finally out and a young prophet is dead and Dean sits against the side of a concrete wall with Metatron's sword through his chest and an ugly Mark on his arm, he thinks maybe he's done his job.

" _I'm proud of us,"_ he says. He hopes Sam finds a new dog and a new Amelia. He hopes Sam forgives him for doing the only thing he ever could.

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Dean thinks the world should have ended for him a long, long time ago, but the only difference now is that he doesn't care whether that's true or not. He's just here, pitch-black eyes, muddy soul, and a brother that won't leave him alone.

When Dean comes back to himself, when _Sam_ brings him back, Dean sits on a bed that is his own and shuffles through photographs of what they've lost. After a while, he sets them down and stares at the nightstand gun. Still here, even after all this time. Still blinking up at him with one of its many questions. He wonders when the tables turned, when the job shifted from protecting Sam to protecting Sam from his _own brother_. He wonders how to do that now, with this ugly thing branded onto his skin, branded onto his soul. The gun won't work this time, even if he wanted it to. He doesn't want to think about what that means; about how far away from human he has drifted. It reminds him of the time he lost his gravity, back when Sam was the one with the darkness in his veins. Looking at it now, he's not sure he ever really got it back.

It's almost funny that he thinks of it as 'Darkness,' because it turns out, that's exactly what it is. Sam steps in before it can swallow him whole, and Dean wishes he could be grateful, but instead he watches black fire swirl up from the ground and wash over the world they once gave everything to save, and he wonders why, even after all this time, they're still stuck in the same old ways.

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 **If you're interested in becoming involved with these challenges, feel free to check out Otorisosa-kan's profile or send her a PM. As always, reviews are fabulous and much appreciated! Thanks for reading!**


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